on male victimization and related gender issues.

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Survivors Manchester excluded from Rape Support Fund

One of the main barriers male survivors of sexual violence face is a lack of services. Most existing sexual violence services only assist women and girls. Of the services that do assist men and boys, most provide limited counseling and referrals.

Male survivors need services, however, even when those organizations are created, they face dismissal by the existing female-only groups. For example:

Survivors Manchester, a service which supports men and boys who have suffered sexual abuse, received a letter stating that the Rape Support Fund would only be allocated to women and girls over the age of 13.

The service is the only support centre for male victims of sexual abuse in Manchester and is only one in five across the UK as they received 48% more referrals from last year after the high profile arrests of several famous figures.

Mansel’s link is most interesting regarding sexual violence imho. I’ve seen this PASK study before and found it to contain loads of good information, but to be quite confusingly written. We really ought to review this work in great detail because they’ve collected a lot of good references and given us good leads. I think the authors reveal their cognitive biases at times (treating women as victims and men as not so victimised, even when they report the same abuse etc), but nevertheless the literature they review is wide-ranging.

As Mansel says, they found that many studies find higher rates of sexual IPV perpetrated by women on men than vice versa. The also did a separate comparison of large population-based adult non-student samples and found that (4/13) 31% of the studies gave higher female perpetration than male, specifically for sexual abuse.

I read Santa’s link too earlier and think it makes a lot of interesting points regarding possible interpretations of the questions typically asked. I wonder what Tamen makes of it.

Initially I thought to move these comments to another post discussing another sexual violence prevalency paper, but as a WordPress novice I couldn’t figure out how to do it, or even if it’s possible. Anyhow.

First a note from the PASK study looking at DV:

Thus, the ratio of uni-directional female-to-male (FMPV) compared to male-to-female (MFPV) IPV differed significantly among samples with higher rates of female-perpetrated unidirectional violence found in four of the five sample types considered. A higher ratio of male-to-female unidirectional violence was only found in criminal justice/legal studies that relied on police reports of IPV perpetration and/or in samples drawn from the U.S. military.

Police reports show more female victims of uni-direction IPV, all other samples (with the exception of samples from the U.S. military) show more male victims of uni-directional IPV. Seems like an indication that male victims of uni-directional IPV are much less likely to report to the police than female victims.

There is a lot of content in the link mansel provided and I haven’t had time to do so in any comprehensive manner yet.